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Cybercrime can cost up to $500 billion globally and potentially 500,000 U.S. jobs!

According to a report released Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (and commissioned by McAfee), real-world losses that result from cybercrime total between $100 billion and $500 billion globally per year! The study states that cybercrime can potentially lead to the loss of 500,000 jobs in the United States, alone!

The Center recruited economists, intellectual property experts, and security researchers to develop the report. Researcher compared their estimates to such activities as as losses in car crashes, piracy, pilferage and crime, and drugs. ZDNet.com states:

The researchers also found it difficult to rely on methods such as surveys cybercrime victims because companies that revealed their cyber losses often were unable to estimate what had been taken, while intellectual property (IP) losses were difficult to quantify.

Malicious cyber activities involve more than the loss of financial assets or intellectual property, as there are costs from damage to brand and reputation, consumer losses from fraud, opportunity costs of service disruptions and “cleaning up” after breaches, and the cost of increased spending on cybersecurity.

It was also difficult to quantify the cost to national security because the theft of military technology could make nations less secure, by strengthening potential opponents or harming export markets in aerospace, advanced materials, or other high-end products.

“[When it comes to cybercrime], it is often the same actors pursuing a collection plan that targets both military and commercial sources,” the report said. “We cannot accurately assess the dollar value of the loss in military technology, but we can say that cyberespionage shifts the terms of engagement in favor of foreign competitors.”

The effects of cybercrime on U.S. employment could be even greater than the high-end estimate of 508,000 jobs lost, if a good portion of these jobs were high-end manufacturing jobs that moved overseas because of intellectual property losses, according to James Lewis, director and senior fellow of the technology and public policy program at CSIS, and a co-author of the report.

Guess who PAYS the costs of cybercrime?

(Note added July 25, 2013: The Standford University network was hacked today, for the second time since May .)

-Bill at

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